Read on Twitter
1/ On Tuesday, @TheNewSchool announced it would violate the Collective Bargaining Agreement it has with its unionized adjuncts in @UAW7902, and while may not seem like a big deal, this is the *beginning of the end* of TNS as it has existed for 101 years… A THREAD
2/ This banal admin move is really an underhanded labor suppression tactic; by delaying teaching offer letters until the day before their holiday break, it ensures the admin aren't available for the 15-day window adjuncts have to clarify and either accept or reject the offer.
3/ Due to TNS firing 122 admin employees and not re-hiring over 200 student workers this Fall, the student registration process the past 3 weeks has been the worst I’ve ever witnessed in 6 years of University teaching; multiple redundant course management platforms…
4/ …displaying inconsistent information on each platform which sneakily and without consent increases the maximum class size caps; panicked students not being allowed to register for courses in their own departments without emailing to get permission from their advisors;
5/ meanwhile the advisors are overworked because they have had to take on the additional work of their recently-fired former colleagues in the same amount of time.
6/ To be clear; The New School did this thanks to a plan to “Reimagine” the university, which is the well-paid-for advice of @Huron Consulting, founded by ex-employee's of ENRON’s former accounting firm Arthur Anderson which became Huron Consulting.
7/ Here's some background on @Huron's role at @TheNewSchool in @TheNation: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/new-school-huron/
8/ More concisely, here's a fact sheet from the American Association of University Professors @AAUP New School Chapter @aauptns about @Huron's role and track record (it's... dark) https://www.thenewschoolaaup.org/actions/huron-fact-sheet
9/ @TheNewSchool fired these employees in October, did not re-hire student workers from last Spring as they normally do—who are best positioned to help current students with advising and faculty w/ other admin tasks—which they said was “due to covid," but these...
10/ ...anti-worker tactics have been going on since long before the 2 years I've been teaching at @NSSRNews @parsonsdesign. This is clearly Covid-excused fraud: using a pandemic as the excuse for what they were planning to do anyway. Its @NaomiAKlein's Shock Doctrine at work!
11/ This is like saying I’m not just not going to pay my internet bill even though (especially now!) I still need to use it “due to covid.” The need is still there; in fact, it has increased!
12/ Then the University had the gall to advertise a job whose title is most essentially Coordinated Disinformation Campaign Propaganda Minister, to show HOW. THIS. COULD. BE. GOOD. FOR. THE. FACULTY? https://twitter.com/_/status/1328372283484860419
13/ @Huron has some experience with using sock puppets to parrot their not-very-cleverly-disguised-capital-worship propaganda, which they've employed for client @uvmvermont president @SVGarimella against @UAunion @StopUVMCuts
14/ Let's ask "Kristie," @kristiesbrown
or "Karolyn" @KarolynLeonar14
or "Gary" @garywpdx or "Darren" @darrenmoorehead. Oh wait, they're sock puppet accounts made by @Huron to wage an astroturfed PR campaign against their own client @UVM's employees
or "Karolyn" @KarolynLeonar14
or "Gary" @garywpdx or "Darren" @darrenmoorehead. Oh wait, they're sock puppet accounts made by @Huron to wage an astroturfed PR campaign against their own client @UVM's employees
15/ So now the departmental employees @SENSUAW, whose colleagues the New School President, Provost and it’s shadow government @Huron Consulting (again, the former ENRON(!) accountants from ex-Arthur Anderson FFS) unceremoniously fired, are now being forced to take on…
16/ …the additional student and faculty advising and support, which used to be multiple people’s jobs. If their workload was x many students, now it is 3x as many students.
17/ Huron has impossibly increased each advisor’s workload with no understanding of the repercussions of their misinformed accounting; they are violently pushing these administrative employees to the brink of human sanity.
18/ The auto-replies from these workers I received when responding to students’ questions (which as an adjunct I *do not* get paid to do) were heartbreaking.
19/ It’s important to be clear about what @Huron and Provost @Dean_Stephanie are doing RIGHT NOW: manufacturing and detonating a mental health crisis for students, their remaining admin employees, and adjunct faculty.
20/ They are doing this so they can depress what they pay teachers and university workers—who are the actual ones whose labor creates the value for and runs the university—to lower overhead...
21/ and extract more tuition money via debt-financed promises of a symbolic educational certificate (the holy degree) which they are rapidly hollowing out to be worthless.
22/ This is 2008 all over again, but instead of home mortgages and foreclosure of the roof over one’s head resulting in homelessness, the financial vehicle is student debt and the result is lifetime of debt servitude. This is predatory.
23/ This is financial and promissory fraud driven by pure greed and the credit default swap fees it generates for @goldmansachspfm /Chase/BofA and their investment arms on the backs of students. It is a scam!
24/ And everyone involved in this system who are attempting to give and receive an education has no choice but to acquiesce, or not be able to pay rent, buy food, or get medical care—in a pandemic!
25/ Because of TNS’ delay, departmental administrators can’t respond (or are forced to respond over their Christmas holiday break out of dedication to their advisees) and are simply forced to cram more students into each course without instructors consent, which involves…
26/ …guilting them into agreeing, and thus reducing the care and attention teachers (i.e. me) can devote to each student. I currently have 19 students registered for my class, with apparently 7 on the wait list, for a course that meets for 2 hours and 40 minutes once a week.
27/ The class is one where we learn about publishing, we design publications and discuss them through critique and feedback. If I have 17 students in the class, like I did last year, that’s roughly 13 minutes per student, without factoring in transition time.
28/ If I have 20 students in the class, that’s 11 minutes for presentation and discussion of each student's design project. If I have 25, for example that’s 8 minutes and 48. But I guess these accountants at @Huron know that already.
29/ They've assumed that design education scales infinitely like user generated content on a platform, when in reality its a process of mutual challenge, discovery & processing; individual growth through feedback; mentoring in a collaborative, trusting learning environment.
30/ Since the bean counters at @Huron are now the Shadow Government of @TheNewSchool, I was curious how their quantitative analytics justify this, so I did what they would do: spreadsheets to work out how they plan to run a tuition-supported (instead of endowment) University.
31/ For my Design & The Future of Publishing course last Spring, TNS received $98,460 in tuition from the 17 students. Guess how much I saw of that? 4.67%; or $4,300. TNS kept 95.43% of those students’ (debt-financed) loan money. Great system we got here.
32/ 95% of students tuition money (for many students, that means a lifetime of debt) is going to… where exactly? The king? Is this... feudalism?
Here's @TheNewSchool's own public budget document: https://drive.google.com/file/d/12UvhszwniNKOWtEnfA1cqAUOlxGkiIRn/view
Here's @TheNewSchool's own public budget document: https://drive.google.com/file/d/12UvhszwniNKOWtEnfA1cqAUOlxGkiIRn/view
33/ I'm reminded of Ursula K. LeGuin's 2014 @nationalbook Lifetime Achievement Award acceptance speech:
"The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism; it's power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings."
"The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism; it's power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings."
34/ You might also be thinking; that’s a lot more than other adjuncts get at less brand name schools with less symbolic brand value (Thanks @TimGunn, I guess?), and you’re right; they should get paid a lot more too!
35/ But what makes TNS' evil-yet-banal 3-day delay so insidious is that, per @GiniaNYT @sanjaygreddy quote ( https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/16/nyregion/new-school-nyc-endowment-layoffs.html) we know “management salaries had increased by 45 percent between 2014 and 2019. During that same period, revenue increased only 17 percent.”
36/ So what's next? Where do we go from here?
1. Mass Tuition Refusal; to the students, just don’t pay it! The University has positioned YOU as a customer; don’t buy their product.
1. Mass Tuition Refusal; to the students, just don’t pay it! The University has positioned YOU as a customer; don’t buy their product.
37/ The certificate they’re offering at the end is no longer worth the paper it’s printed on because your overpriced zoom landlords are destroying its reputational value.
38/ This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t learn; on the contrary, it means you should learn more of what you actually want to learn for the 21st century, directly from those who know it without a middleman profiting.
39/ 2. Move the already-online instruction from the venture-capital-lax-security-lecture-capture-platform @Zoom_us to private @Discord servers and @Twitch streams, and use @Patreon for payroll: combining student tuition payments and faculty disbursements into one instead of…
40/ …using the University as a rent-seeking middleman. I wish there were a viable platform cooperative alternative to Patreon and these companies, please let me know if there is @PCC_Global @ntnsndr? Maybe now is the time to invest in and build those?
41/ 3. Public accountability for the reckless administrators; President @dwightamcbride and Provost @Dean_Stephanie office ( https://www.newschool.edu/provost/ ) who are gutting the soul of higher education in America.
42/ Let these former scholars know they will no longer have their inflated job titles and plush offices with expense accounts, because there will no longer be students (a.k.a. their revenue stream) at @TheNewSchool, because their university will no longer exist.
43/ 4. Getting @NewYorkStateAG Laetitia James involved, this bait-and-switch on the students by @Huron and @TheNewSChool is rapidly veering into Trump University territory—Tish James knows how to prosecute that 
44/ Those 4 actions can make a difference bc for the first time in humanity history, a paradigm shift has occurred in media, in which the audience (students, employees, adjuncts, alumni) has the authority to manifest reality: to confront injustice collectively thru REFUSAL.
45/ Possibly the most tragic thing about this is that the history of the founding of The New School 101 years ago shows how it was born out of the exact same struggle: https://www.newschool.edu/nssr/history/
46/ If you read the founding document in the @TNSarchives from 1919 at
https://digitalarchives.library.newschool.edu/index.php/Detail/objects/NS030105_000504
https://digitalarchives.library.newschool.edu/index.php/Detail/objects/NS030105_000504
47/ it begins; “The political and social problems forced upon the country by the economic development of the past 25 years call for a new type of leadership in every field of American life.
48/ These problems have been emphasized and made critical by the great war [ed note: today that’s COVID & also the non-prosecution legacy of the 2008 Wall Street bailout] and an honest effort toward their solution is the obvious duty of non-combatants at home to the men who…
49/ …are fighting to make a better world. To this end we need teachers who have first-hand knowledge of the world of actual endeavor and are prepared to apply their several specialties to the current issues of the day.”
50/ This article in @jacobinmag ( https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/12/the-new-school-nssr-austerity-covid-neoliberalism) really illuminates the stakes of this fight: not only for the soul and reputation of The New School, but for the fate of ALL American higher education.
51/ Let’s be clear, this is The Shirky Principle in action: “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”
52/ Ironically, @cshirky is now Vice Provost for Educational Technologies at NYU, where I’m also an Adjunct Professor 
(also represented by @UAW7902)
(also represented by @UAW7902)
53/ Continuing on p.6, The New School founding proposal document drives the urgency of the present situation home: “The legal control of all our institutions is placed in the hands of bodies of trustees, composed for the most part of men...
54/ ...whose views of political, social, religious and moral question are in no way in advance of those of the average respectable citizen.
55/ Their tendency is therefore rather to defend established thought than to encourage a fundamental reconsideration of long accepted ideals and standards...
56/ The one consideration that they can always safely neglect is the scientific conscience of the members of their faculties.”
These were the words of a 1919 exodus of educators from @Columbia (in coordination with scholars like Thorstein Veblen).
These were the words of a 1919 exodus of educators from @Columbia (in coordination with scholars like Thorstein Veblen).
57/ When the Ivy League had become *so* elitist and out of touch that they no longer carried out their educational mission but instead existed primarily to uphold the entrenched ruling power structure; today the financialization of a lifetime of insurmountable student debt.
58/ I hope that this uncomfortable fact—that the Institution that was once the home of intellectual refugees of multiple waves of 20th century Fascisms; of the New Frankfurt School, the University-in-Exile, home to scholars including Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse and others…
59/ …targeted for their ideas, is ITSELF now perpetrating an updated 21st century Fascism against its own precarious employees and students today—is not lost on everyone, or is not simply being ignored by everyone thinking “it can’t happen here” https://genius.com/The-mothers-of-invention-it-cant-happen-here-lyrics
60/ This is made even MORE tragic by the fact that @TheNewSchool itself is the home of scholars (Full Time Tenured Faculty) who have theorized and given us the language to describe this 21st century fascism of the vectorialist class like @Huron
61/ —important scholars whom I look up to as role models in so many ways: @mckenziewark and @shannonmattern being two shining examples. But also equally @mayawiley, @mindphul, @profcarroll, and so many others.
62/ I can only hope this Ouroboros moment might make everyone examine this silent coercion of their own inaction becoming a conduit for the reinforcement of our own collective impoverishment, and recognize our agency to refuse as, perhaps, a last act of hope and solidarity.
63/ Because if the Full Time Faculty @aauptns & the @TheNewSchool students, adjuncts @UAW7902, departmental employees @SENSUAW together, collectively, do not refuse to accept this banal administrative evil, we *ALL* will not have a university to meet at in a year or two…
64/ What’s clear is that @Huron’s scorched-earth anti-labor underhanded technocratic union busting tactics to run @TheNewSchool’s legacy into the ground, in the process of pivoting to corporate-employer-paid-for online continuing education a la Microsoft-owned LinkedIn is…
65/ …unethical at the very least; at worst, the President @dwightamcbride, Provost @Dean_Stephanie and @Huron are financializing its symbolic value & reputation into a credit default swappable investment product resulting in a lifetime of debt servitude for their students 
66/ I have a hunch that’s something we ALL probably DO NOT want to be a part of? Do you?
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